


après moi le déluge /  after me comes the flood

by interestinggin



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 11:11:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4623156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/interestinggin/pseuds/interestinggin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Speeding out of town in a stolen vehicle, Peggy swears under her breath. All she saw of the gunman was a flash of something metal catching the sun, and a dark blur moving quicker than she thought possible. </p><p>When she gets back to the States, she will start a file that will sit, unregarded, in the bottom of her desk for several years. One day, a man whose name used to be Barnes will see her face in a photograph, and the word he will say will be ‘Target’, and things will slot into place at last.</p>
            </blockquote>





	après moi le déluge /  after me comes the flood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Neftzer_nettlestonenell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neftzer_nettlestonenell/gifts).



> Written for the prompt: "Peggy Carter first hears something about this 'winter soldier' in the late 1960s/early 70s and it gives her spidey sense all kinds of unhappy feels."
> 
> Title is from Regina Spektor, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbeHq1CLqJ8

_be afraid of the cold / they'll inherit your blood  
après moi, le déluge /  after me comes the flood _

 

The first she hears about it is in 1967. One of her agents is shot on the job in Georgia; a slug straight through the shoulderblades, leaving him dead on the spot. The killer is unknown, and she can’t waste resources on a lone gunman. They mourn, and she writes to his family, and thinks no more about it.

 

It is almost a year later, newly appointed Director, that another death that will come in fifty years to be attributed to the weapon she does not yet know is called the Winter Soldier crosses her desk; this time it is a Russian defector, a woman they hoped would be able to tell them something more of the biological advances that they have reason to suspect Brehznev is turning a blind eye to. The agent who is supposed to be helping her escape the country finds her in the airport bathroom, neck snapped, the gun in her hand still smoking with residue.

There’s blood on the tiles where her final act hit home. Agent Carroll has the sense to scrape some off and bring it back as a sample before he starts on the disposal of the body. It turns out to be Type B, with some additional traces they can’t quite decipher. Give them time, they say, and she does.

 

1972\. Peggy’s mother dies. It has nothing to do with the Winter Soldier, but it does send her back to England for a spell; to sort out the house, and to go to the funeral, and to visit her family - what little remains of it now. They ask her what she does, and she says vaguely that she’s working for the American government in a minor capacity. They are proud, if confused. As she leaves the solicitor’s office the morning after, wearing her mourning clothes wrapped up tightly under a long black trenchcoat, the glass of the window smashes behind her head.

She is down on the ground in a moment, crouched behind the wheels of what Howard Stark would be able to tell her is a Ford Zodiac (though Peggy, interested in cars only for their ability to transport her from one place to another, would not have listened) with her gun drawn from its holster and a compact mirror out in front of her, trying to work out the trajectory of the bullet. She sees something moving on the top floor of the warehouse opposite, and realises that while the sniper might be able to keep track, her pistol will never be able to make the shot.

Peggy grips the handle of the car door with both hands and is relieved to find it open; it is, after all, a small market town. She throws herself into it and lies flat across the front seats; an urge that she is grateful for as moments later the window cracks and a bullet drops down between the seats.

He has to be reloading. She sits up, and starts the car.

Speeding out of town in a stolen vehicle, she swears under her breath. All she saw of the gunman was a flash of something metal catching the sun, and a dark blur moving quicker than she thought possible. When she gets back to the States, she will start a file that will sit, unregarded, in the bottom of her desk for several years. One day, a man whose name used to be Barnes will see her face in a photograph, and the word he will say will be ‘Target’, and things will slot into place at last.

 

Some years after England, Daniel Souza sidles into her office; he knocks first, with the handle of his cane, and then sits down heavily opposite her. He’s aged more than she has; there’s more grey than black in that hair, and somebody in the last ten years must have told him a moustache suits him. Peggy disagrees, but he seems to like it, and that’s the important thing.

They have both been working here too long to pretend they don’t know what this visit means.

“How many,” sighs Peggy, “and where?”

“Two,” says Daniel. “Hansen and Bell. Switzerland.”

She closes her eyes for a moment and rubs at the them, her reading glasses discarded on the pile of paperwork. Bell was in her twenties; Hansen, she thinks, was newly married - or engaged, or something like that. She never knows them well anymore. “I’ll make sure the cheques are paid. Give me the letters,” she says, holding out her hand.

He hesitates. She looks up from the paperwork. “What?”

“Director,” he says, looking worried. “He wants to make a bargain.”

Peggy is incensed. “The  _bastard_  murders two of my agents, and he wants to _bargain_?”

“He says he didn’t,” says Daniel. He shrugs. He knows that she won’t lose her temper, not with the suspect; not with something as important as justice on the line. He underestimated her once, and he never intends to again. But he trusts her fury, and her right to have it, and he will wait out the storm if she needs him to.

Peggy, hands on the desk, bracing herself as if against some great storm, nods. She does not like this feeling. Her grandmother used to say she could feel it i _n her waters_ ; Angie always calls it someone  _walking over her grave_ ; Peggy, less superstitious, simply says it is something she cannot define, but whatever it may be, it means trouble.

 

The man who says he did not kill her agents is thin, shifty, pale; he looks around himself as if he fears that the very walls will turn against him. Peggy is unconvinced.

“Do you speak English?” she asks.

After a moment, he nods. “Better than most. I worked in England, during the war. I was loyal -”

“Save it.” She sits. No weapons visible. Not on her. “You killed my agents. Tell me why I should waste my time listening to you.”

“It was not me.” He looks up, at the soldiers standing guard, at the guns in their hands. He has sweat on his brow. “You trust these men?”

Peggy raises an eyebrow. “A lot more than I trust you, Herr Breiner.”

“I swear to you. I did not do this thing. I ran, and he was sent after me, and they helped me. They died that way. They died for me. I am guilty, but I am not their murderer. I swear. It was him.”

“Who?”

He stares at her as if he is amazed she does not know. He still has blood from one of her agents - she wonders idly which - splattered on the collar of his shirt. Gunned down as they tried to help him. Gunned down for this man. An unfair trade, she thinks unkindly, but perhaps not.

He shudders as he says the name. “The Soldier.”

Peggy looks at him. “Is that supposed to mean something to me, Herr Breiner?”

Breiner shakes his head in horror. “He’s a  _ghost_ ,” he whispers. “He’s a nightmare made up to scare children, a monster from a bedtime story.”

“I don’t believe in monsters,” says Peggy, reflecting as she does that it is a lie. She has met monsters, more than once.

Breiner swears in German, quick and fluid and scared; leans in towards Peggy with a look of pure agony on his face. “They tell you he’s nothing,” he hisses. She can see he is half with her, in that room, and half so very, very far away. “They tell you not to look at him, not to recognise that he exists. He is a creature of the dark and he obeys every order they give, and he has never failed a mission, not ever. Do you understand that? There have been tales of him for decades and they say he has never failed to catch his prey. He always gets them. He always gets you.”

Peggy has lost patience with this. “This ghost, Herr Breiner. Does he have a name?”

He shakes his head. “I told you, already I have told you -”

“Does he have a  _name_?”

“ _Soldat_ ,” he hisses again. “He is the Soldier, Director. The Winter Soldier. He has no other.”

She closes her eyes, tired of all of this. Tired, and wanting her bed, and Angie, and the peace that home can bring even now. “That’s not enough. I’ve had enough of my time wasted with your children’s stories, Herr Breiner. Goodnight.”

“Wait!” He worries at his lips, and Peggy, half-standing, hesitates.

“If you have anything of  _use_  to say,” she says levelly, “now is the time.”

“He has a metal arm,” he mutters, staring down at the woodstains of the table. “That is - that is all I know.”

Peggy thinks, though she does not know why, of necks snapped as though they were nothing, with bruising like fingers round the throat; of a flash of light in a window far above her; of movement she could not understand.

“Fine,” she says. She knocks on the door to call a guard. “Thank you for your co-operation, Herr Breiner,” she adds, nodding at him briefly. “It will be considered in your hearing. Take him back to his cell.”

 

Breiner dies two days later; he has hanged himself in his cell, though the agent who finds him expresses amazement that a man of his age could manage the dexterity needed to reach up to the top of the bars, and marvels at the image. Peggy, when she views the body, sees something different; a hand of glistening, bloodsoaked metal, reaching down and lifting up a grown man as if he weighed no more than a child.

 _He always gets you_ , she thinks, and shudders in the sudden cold, like a winter breeze in the heat of summer, like breath on the back of her neck, like someone walking over her grave.

Like a ghost.


End file.
